The wildland–urban interface represents landscape change—changes brought about by urbanization, by shifts in forest management, and altered disturbance regimes, each having ecological, social, and economic ramifications. In this chapter, I will focus on some of the ecological ramifications associated with landscape change, primarily forest fragmentation and deforestation, resulting from urbaniz...

Fragmentation of forest types is an indicator of biodiversity in the Montreal Process, but the available national data permit assessment of only overall forestland fragmentation, not forest type fragmentation. Here we illustrate how to localize national statistics from the 2003 National Report on Sustainable Forests by combining state vegetation maps with national forestland fragmentation maps....

Forest fragmentation can disrupt important ecological processes both within and among species. Of particular interest is the extent to which fragmentation decouples economically important pest species from their parasites. In an influential paper, Roland and Taylor (1997) advanced the hypothesis that forest fragmentation at a relatively fine spatial scale would disrupt the ability of parasitoid...

“Fragmentation of forest types” is an indicator of biological diversity in the Montréal Process. In the 2003 U.S. National Assessment, the indicator was interpreted as the extent to which forests are distributed as large blocks of habitat. It was assessed by measuring patch size, amount of edge, interpatch distance, and patch contrast on land-cover maps derived from satellite imagery. Although ...

BACKGROUND Recent studies have shown that fragmentation is an increasing threat to global forests, which has major impacts on biodiversity and the important ecosystem services provided by forested landscapes. Several tools have been developed to evaluate global patterns of fragmentation, which have potential applications for REDD+. We study how canopy height and above ground biomass (AGB) chang...

We report an analysis of forest fragmentation based on 1-km resolution land-cover maps for the globe. Measurements in analysis windows from 81 km 2 (9 x 9 pixels, “small” scale) to 59,049 km 2 (243 x 243 pixels, “large” scale) were used to characterize the fragmentation around each forested pixel. We identified six categories of fragmentation (interior, perforated, edge, transitional, patch, an...

In this study we investigated the relationship between the sensitivity to forest fragmentation of bird species and their habitat spatial distribution. We hypothesized that a homogenous spatial distribution is associated to habitat-generalist species, which would tend to be less sensitive to forest fragmentation; in contrast, a heterogeneous spatial distribution would drive to an increase of sen...

Although forest fragmentation and degradation have been recognized as one of major threats to wild panda population, little is known about the relationship between panda distribution and forest fragmentation. This study is unique as it presents a first attempt at understanding the effects of forest fragmentation on panda spatial distribution for the entire wild panda population. Using a moving ...

We investigated spatial configuration of economic returns, to enhance models of forest fragmentation for western Oregon and western Washington. Drawing from spatial land rent theory, economic drivers of forest fragmentation at the landscape level include land quality comprised of attributes such as soil fertility or the distance of urban plots to amenities. We included the spatial configuration...

Forest fragmentation and plant diversity have been shown to play a crucial role for herbivorous insects (herbivores, hereafter). In turn, herbivory-induced leaf area loss is known to have direct implications for plant growth and reproduction as well as long-term consequences for ecosystem functioning and forest regeneration. So far, previous studies determined diverging responses of herbivores ...